Deluxe. Five bedrooms, four baths. Swimming pool.
So are they all. Four solid blocks. Beach all the way to the highway. Green roofs and white polyurethane fences to separate properties.
The mall, when I was young, Had three shops and a bar. When we stopped going, they had a movie theater built.
And there were horses too. Wild horses. The shit you see in movies. Harming one carried a $50,000 fine.
They moved them out to an island off the cape, I've heard. The developers weren't happy when they started getting hit by Excursions.
The mall is gigantic. It has...
She didn't look at him. She couldn't look at him. What would he think? she wondered as she sipped her wine and kept her eyes averted while he looked at her steadily, scratching his prematurely grey beard. "What's wrong?" he asked in his tenor voice.
"Nothing," she lied, and felt guilty for it.
"Come on," Mark said. He rolled over to Mary, took her hand and squeezed it gently. "We've been friends since we were kids, darlin'. You can tell me anything. Just like I can tell you anything."
"I love you," she blurted. Mark blinked at her as she...
It confused them, the gnarled branch lying across rows of newly planted wheat. The tree had been healthy and the weather clear. A bob of bushy fur worked its way along the length of the fallen wood as a squirrel investigated the carnage.
Years from now, when the children had scaled the sheer rock face near their home, they'd think back to this day.
"And now where shall we climb?" the boy asked.
"There," the girl replied, a mountain peak under her finge
The day it burned down my mother locked herself in her room and wouldn't take any visitors.
"Mom, come out of there!" my little sister whined and cried for her.
"No!" "It's not fair, it's not right!" "This didn't happen, it couldn't have!"
Her memories of him, that Winter in 1973 where they sat on the front steps of the chapel and watched bikes and cars drive by... The day they got married; January 19, 1973. When they blew off the after-wedding limo to watch the snow fall, later to hitchhike to their own reception.
It was just like her,...
They had only met a through days ago through the happy coincidence that they were staying at the same hotel on the same island at the same time. They had met at a bar, neither their friends back home would be surprised by that fact, and had become fast friends.
Gloria was twenty-one, a full time secretary who was travelling alone, just needing to escape the soap opera of a life she had back home.
Mallory was a second year student, on holiday with her mother, step-father and three much younger half-siblings. She had been relieved to find a kindred...
Woof woof. Woof woof woof woof woof. Woof. Bark woof. Woof. Woof woof woof. Bark bark woof bark. Woof.
When he said he'd take me far away, to a world I'd never seen, I had expected more than this.
"You're just seeing the scaffolding."
"What is there that isn't scaffolding? It's...there's nothing else there. It's hollow. It's broken."
He covered my eyes with his hands, pointed me in a direction and hissed "walk" in my ear.
I had presumed this was going to be a date. Clearly I was incorrect.
I could feel the ground beneath my feet alter, and suddenly everything felt different - I was enclosed, and yet not enclosed at all (there was light spilling in,...
.. 2080 ... 2090 ... 2100. 2100 NE Swenson Avenue, that was the address. Harold was certain of it. He could almost feel an unnatural attraction to the simple white door with blue finish that innocently faced the street, surrounded by colorful flower pots.
A hesitant step after another, his heart pounding, he approached it. His thoughts were hundreds of miles away, in his home country, where his family was held hostage. They were watching his every move, listening to his every breath. If he failed, his wife and children would die.
His hand rested on the doorknob. The windows...
It's ringing. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. STOP it from ringing!
Karla never wanted to hear his voice again. Never wanted to hear that damn ring of the public phone at on the corner of East and Cherry. Never wanted to wait again; to see if he'd call, usually he wanted money. Always for drugs. Drug money. Meth money. That idiot, he was killing himself, and now he wanted their son. Brian wouldn't even look at Gray when he came to the lobby of their high rise, his dad was always high, red-eyed, and stumbling. They used the pay phone in case...
When I was twelve I went to sea, aboard a small ship. They hired me to clean and sweep and feed the men, in exchange they said they would take me across the ocean to the new world.
A week or two after shipping out, a storm rose on the horizon. The wind she blew and rain she fell and waves crashed into the sides.
The captain went first, and then his crew, leaving just me and another, a drunk.
The sails were torn, and the bow was pierced, the hull became full of water. Neither of us knew how...